An approach to Frye’s statement – romance-irony-parody

          There’s an assumption that literature, like language itself, has a grammar or syntax, on, which our understanding of it inevitably depends. For the reader, the simplest and the subtlest understanding of literature must depend on a similar tacit but necessary knowledge of the grammar of literature. Frye suggests we should use recurrent patterns, because they are there. For him, an inductive survey of all western literature reveals the presence of four archetypal narrative patterns, called mythoi by Frye and the lyrics analogues, romance, irony, tragedy and comedy, constituting the basic framework of literature (Frye 01).

            He believes that as structure the central principle of irony myth is best approached as a parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical forms to more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways” (Anatomy of criticism 223, Smith 860-871-872).

          We can imagine a world in which goals are thwarted and nightmares become reality (the world of irony). In this sense, we need to qualify the relationship between narrative patterns and individual works of literature in a third way. Just as the pattern of expectations cannot be derived from or limited to a single literary work, so the particulars of the work cannot be reduced to the

Cunha 02

pattern. The full meaning of any story worth our time depends on pattern but can never be reduced to it. Each narrative pattern is related to the mode. Each mode has a special affinity with one of the narrative patterns. E.g. romantic mode and romance, ironic mode and irony. (A transition from archetypal criticism as practiced by Hughes to archetypal criticism based on Frye’s thought can also be observed (Foulke and Smyth 7-10)).

           In romance narratives, as in the myths they often draw on, animals give warnings, dragons threaten, and princes inevitably rescue the beleaguered at the darkest moment (Frye 45).

           The romance narrative most often dominates the earliest period in the literary history of a culture. It reflects more than the human need to give respectability to dreams. Romantic ideals are originally manifested in the hero’s quest with is rewards of the beautiful heroine, great wealth, a position of power, and the attainment of a kind of wisdom, often derived from some arcane source. Like the narrative structure, the characters of romance are obedient to a higher order. In spite of the ambiguity of the Green Knight and other shape-shifters in the complex versions of romance, most characters are ranked with good or evil, the divine or the demoniac, and openly wear the moral insignia of white or black.  There’s a kind of conflict between divine and demoniac forces. It’s better to remain neutral (Frye 48-49).

           “Verbal irony says one thing and means another, so narrative irony often alludes to one structure and creates another. It is this allusive design that leads critics to speak of irony in terms of the other three major narrative patterns: a work may seen ironic because it is structurally close to “but no quite comedy, or because it ” isolates” one and only one element from tragedy, or because it “adopts feature from romance and then transmutes it into its opposite”. All these insights strike us as valid, if only because to define irony by what it is not is to affirm the negative principle that is the hallmark of the mode (Frye 223-239).

Cunha 03

            The idea that irony operates on some such denial of a formal or structural expectation underlies Northrop Frye’s original concept of the narrative pattern. The central principle of ironic myth is best approached as a parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content, which fits them in unexpected ways. The important term is parody. Although we usually think of parody as the humorous use of the writer’s style to that a subject strikingly uncharacteristic of his work, there’s a familiar tradition in literature of structural parodies. Whether stylistic or structural – and admittedly, the line is hard to draw – the effect of parody depends on some violation of a convention that requires the equivalence between manner and matter, form and content (Foulke and Smith 860).

            There’s in the work of contemporary ironists a variety of compounded duplicity, in the face of which the innocent general reader has little assurance that there is a meaningful system on which he and the author would agree or at least consistently disagree. Pervaded by incongruity, irony resists our terms and categories, and we are reduced more often than critically comfortable, to negative definitions and to working through antonyms from the other narrative forms toward irony. Our sense of the divine that gives order to the narratives of romance leads us to recognize the principle of disorder that confuses the ironic narrative (Foulke and Smith 861).

            Perhaps the better strategy is to characterize the world of irony in the negative to speak of it as unidealized existence without laying claim to a greater realism, a claim dictated more by our contemporary tastes than by critical understanding.

            One example of irony that goes beyond conventional limits is the put on, the facetious and bizarre event or discourse that all its apparent structure and intention we cannot interpret as either serious or conventionally satiric. The point of such nonevents is that they have no point: the most that one can do with them is to identify some general target toward which they direct and which

Cunha 04

often turns out to be, as in these instances, the mode of expression itself. Fragmentary, incongruous, indirect – terms like these point to the eclectic nature of irony and the paradoxical fact that the ironist, assuming the most independent of roles, is in fact the most dependent on the conventions of literature. Indeed, irony seems somehow parasitical, living on the other narrative patterns and drawing its sustenance from another value system, for there’s nothing in its abstract and negative vision that can, in itself, generate anything like a conventional pattern of action. The controlling metaphor in the ironic mode is the disappearance or dismemberment of the hero. Frye identifies the mode through a hero who is inferior in power and intelligence to us, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration or absurdity, but he adds that this is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.

            The clownish or marginal figure does not escape the ironic world; he is simply and unceremoniously sent on his way. The central form of irony finds its antihero in the hero, the self-deprecating figure, and under his influence adopts from romance, the quest myth turning into a study of self-deception, and the dream of wishfulfilment, transforming it into a nightmare. Under conditions of limited freedom, the central character enjoys an uneasy truce with necessity, and the form gives the impression of being suspended or equivocal on the question of possibilities for change or renewal. The sense of isolation is also reflected, like allowing no freedom and is as closed to the opportunities for change as the prisons and torture chambers the victim inhabits. The romantic hero can destroy the ironic hero or make him incapable for further action. We expect the phases of irony to parody those recurrent events we found in the romantic pattern. In the resolute denial of the meaning of efficacy of tragic fate and comic fortune, denial

Cunha 05

of the meaning of efficacy of tragic fate and comic fortune, and in its insistence on negations and inversions of romantic forms, irony often under the pretense of denying the premises of literary form forces us to reexamine the original principles of literature. But the very force of its opposition its negative imperative becomes a structuring energy. In its antipathy to the assumptions of other modes irony is shaped by the structures it opposes until the denial of convention becomes a convention itself (Foulke and Smith 862-867).

             Gawain, Shakespeare, and Shelley, do not let us incur in devious affirmations of our own importance and do not allow us to avoid the complexity of experience.

             They use the romance pattern to show us how men’s actions matter in ways our ordinary conceptions of existence cannot explain. If we consider Sir Gawain we could say that he was the original hero of many of the adventures later assigned to Lancelot, Perceval and Galahad, like an archetypal myth, well built in the narrative of Sir Gawain the Green Knight, because of the rite of passage, following the phases: separation – initiation – return. It is considered an Arthurian romance. As it’s written in the introduction of the book, the ideal of knightly conduct – of courage, loyalty, and courtesy – against which the poem’s action is to be viewed, was a long-established, though still viable, ideal, which had become subject to superficial acceptance and even satirical treatment. In our century, it’s a similarly subject to ridicule.

               Gawain is a nice personage because he accepts the challenge and is not afraid that he should not return. Loyalty is really a nice feature of a lord. If we analyze that the tricky situation he was invited to participate, even if it’s just imagination or reinforcement of his masculine values, it’s not that difficult to understand he acted like a lord, with his reason, not with his heart. This behavior should be ideal at that time (Borrof vii-xiii).

Cunha 06

              In Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness Marlow is the one who tells the story. We can notice his presence right at the beginning of the saga through the interior of Africa, and then, understand the name of the book.

                 He mentions that when he was a little chap he had the passion for maps. He liked to look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose himself in all the glories of exploration. He remembers to have pointed to the North Pole when he was a child (Conrad 08).

               He arrived in a city that made him thinking about the whited sepulchre.

               Marlow’s invited for an adventure, and he sets his position in his initiation to it by saying:

“My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment: but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some inferno” (Conrad 17). He describes his approach to this situation by saying: I shook hand with this miracle, and I learned he (white man) was the company’s chief accountant, and that all the bookkeeping was done at this station. He was devoted to his work, and had not taken care of himself so much.

                The adventure to Africa contains the stage of a rite of passage. Marlow retells the adventure and the story of Kurtz while his friends are stuck in the Thames River (in London) while the tide is flowing out. It shows the ambition of people to expand their horizontal line toward new societies, and the extension of forces, in the attempt to dominate new lands. When they come back they hybrid people, and acquired hybrid culture. His meeting with Kurtz in the woods, and the adverse conditions he was found, left him the frustration of a lost personage, who had so many things to tell him. The immense feeling of lost invaded his mind, and conduced him to reflections and immersion to his unconscious life. Buddha is mentioned at the end of the book. Like the prophet, Marlow got isolated, and emerged in deep reflection (Conrad 78).

Cunha  07

             The man, who seemed to have the heaven as his final destination, burns like being condemned to the hell, metaphorically. By reading the explanation of Hughes about Orpheus, one can understand that neither Conrad’s Kurtz nor his Marlow became Orpheus. Kurtz because he was overwhelmed by his journey back and down, Marlow because he drew back from completing the journey ( Hughes 112). Dr. Lyle Smith, the instructor of this course, explains that Hughes is wrong about Marlow – he comes back an integrated person with a negative vision of humanity, a vision approximate to irony. Kurtz is the reembodiment of Lycurgus and Pentheus, Marlow reincarnates Perseus, the acceptor. The story he tells us is, in a sense, the equivalent of the temple Perseus dedicated to the power of Dyonisos (Hughes 60). Kurtz had something to say, and said it by a different way, like demonstrating inferiority as a hero, as Frye identifies (Folk and Smith 865). His journey is spatial and temporal as well as psychic (to the roots of his own unconscious) the consort of Kurtz becomes the goal of Marlow’s inner search. He lies to Kurtz‘s intended about him.

            It seems that Gawain or Marlow, Lord Bercilak and Kurtz, Lady Bercilak and the intended of Kurtz, come to a certain approach of identities. After all, it’s possible to understand that there’s no evidence of romance except that Lady Bercilak tries to seduce Sir Gawain. The heroes, Marlow and Gawain can return, after challenging the dangerous adventure they’ve been introduced.

            Another example of hoe difficult is to accommodate a pattern is “Araby”. Its narrative, characters, and imagery are radically displaced to accommodate the pattern – at least until the last scene of the story. It presents the romantic realm of the boy’s imagination (Schechter 409).

         Cunha 08

             In Anatomy of Literature, Foulke and Smith comment about the blind or dead-end street goes through very detailed descriptions of the place, including most of the major elements of the advent and initiation phase of romantic narrative. The boy imagines someone he loves close to religious adoration and magic realm. They conclude that “Araby” could be read, as an ironic narrative for one of the typical devices of irony is the reversal of a romantic pattern. The story also portraits Joyce as an uncertain child. 

               Another story, which could be cited by the same authors in the attempt to figure out Narrative Irony, is “My Kinsman Major Molineux,” written by Hawthorne (Schechter 191-206), which suggests a romance momentarily. As Hughes comments, “cities are dark and labyrinthine, lit only by the ominous carnival lights that flicker through Hawtorne’s analyzed story (Hughes 868). Robin Molineux watches the pillars of a city building become the trees of home in an experience that taunts him with his ineptitude” (Hughes 869). His experience goes through a rite of passage from an immature life to a mature state of conscience. In the last sentence a journey can be speeded by a gentleman, when Robin is looking for a ferry, with the invitation to stay. He would not need Major Molineux. It means he could be important without being helped by anyone. He was young, symphatetic, and a good observer, an outsider treated as a vagabond. A stranger treated with indifference and arrogance, expecting to meet his Major Molineux, who he admitted, could not recognize, inhuman expulsion of the scapegoat as Hughes explains (868).

            In both stories, we see the heroes looking for someone. And when they are close to having their aims, ironically, something moves them far away from what they were looking for.

Cunha 09

             It’s like a turn taken of the expected romantic end, to show the readers, things are not as we desire them to be, but an answer for the circumstances of life, no matter how ironic it seems, “with the characteristic exaggeration of distinctive features of the original for certain purposes, which could be understood as parody” (Gioia G 23).

 Cunha 10      

Works Cited

Borroff, Marie. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, (Norton, 1967).

            Campbell, Joseph. The power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. (Palas Athena, 1990).

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (Photocopy with no reference, 79 pages).        

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, New York:

                     Modern Language Association, 1988.

Gioia, Dana.  Literature, (Longman, 2002).

Harold, Schechter & Jonna Semeiks, Eds. Discoveries: 50 Stories of the Quest, 2nd Ed.

            (Oxford, 1993).

Smith, Lyle E. Archetypal Criticism: Theory and Practice, Carson, CSUDH, USA, 1997.

About the Author

Última atualização do currículo em 30/07/2009
Endereço para acessar este CV:

http://lattes.cnpq.br/2442358803723524

My 10 Top Comedy/Romance Anime Shows [MY OPINION]

Dark Horse Deluxe The Umbrella Academy: Pocket Watch and Statue Set $118.99 Limited to 500, numbered with a certificate of authenticity. For the discerning Umbrella Academy fan and collector, we are proud to introduce a distinguished pocket watch, featuring artwork from the wildly popular The Umbrella Academy, paired with a 5.5″ statuette of 00.05, also known as The Boy, whose character is often seen glancing at a similar timepiece in the saga of his reluctant superhero …